Automatic aerial documentationof historic monuments in 3-D

ArchEyeAutomatic

Visit at Marburg

Last week I visited Dr. Felix Teichner and Christoph Salzmann at the Institute for Prehistoric Archaeology of Marburg University to give a talk on my PhD project. Besides this, we did some fly-arounds with the copters, since Christoph is also working with UAVs in Archaeology and we did a lot of exchange in the last months, but only over internet. So it was just about time to meet again. He showed me his DJI Phantom and even trusted me to fly it a little bit around. It is indeed very easy to steer and is able to fly quite long with a GoPro camera: 20 minutes! Christoph also flew at castle Karlsmunt above Wetzlar in order to detect accessways to the stronghold with his Finwing Penguin. This is an airplane with 1.7 m wingspan, quite impressive how good it flew using the Pixhwak autopilot. He uses a Ricoh GR camera which has a fixed focal length, but offering a very good image quality.